


Vorticity

by burglebezzlement



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Explicit Language, M/M, Meteorology, Road Trip, Storm Chasing, Thunderstorms, Tornado, Tornadoes, bed sharing, hail, meteorologist au, storm chasers AU, tornado AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-06
Updated: 2016-06-06
Packaged: 2018-07-12 13:26:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,554
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7106719
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/burglebezzlement/pseuds/burglebezzlement
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tornado scientist Chuck Shurley just lost his research funding because he’s never seen a tornado in person. Sam Winchester is the star of a storm-chasing YouTube channel whose second member, his brother Dean, just decided to retire from the field. When Chuck reaches out to Sam for help finding a tornado to watch, neither of them realize that tornado season may have its own plans.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Vorticity

**Author's Note:**

> I figure roughly 95% of people clicking on this are here because the amazing MajorEnglishEsquire sucked them into shipping Chuck/Sam. If you’re in the remaining 5%, you should go check out her Chuck/Sam series, [Buy the Ticket, Take the Ride](http://archiveofourown.org/series/289808), which is canon-verse and incredible. 
> 
> I am taking some liberties with grant funding timelines and the turnaround times required to organize a research trip with a Doppler On Wheels (DOW).

The breakfast area at the motel is as crowded as the bar at a meteorology conference, but Chuck Shurley still spots Sam Winchester easily. Sam’s half a head taller than the rest of the room.

Getting to Sam is another matter. Chuck and his coffee make detours around tight knots of storm chasers before he finally bumps into Sam’s brother, Dean, from behind.

“Hey!” Dean turns around. He’s happy, grinning, still on the high from yesterday’s late-season twister, the one that ripped up three miles of corn fields and stopped just short of town and any sort of property destruction. Most of the storm chasing community stopped in town for the night, which means that as the only hotel, this place is packed.

Chuck knows Dean, vaguely, the way he knows most of the other professional storm chasers by now. “Hey, Dean. Good season.”

“You get a chance to see the show yesterday, or are you still hiding out with the Doppler?”

Chuck shrugs. “Someone’s got to be the brains of the forecast operation.”

“Yeah, maybe.” Dean sighs. “Listen, man, if you still haven’t seen one of these in person… you have to.”

“Probably.”

Probably _not._ But Dean wouldn’t understand that. He and Sam have a successful YouTube channel based on their tornado hunting. Storm Facers. They drive around Tornado Alley in a classic car, looking for trouble. Dean swears a lot. Sam’s the geeky one, the one with all the maps, swishing his hair around dramatically while Dean films him pointing at the twisters.

They’re pretty good, for guys who aren’t pros. Chuck’s watched more of their videos than he’d like to admit. He’s always admired Sam, the way you admire someone who goes after the scary shit you’d prefer to avoid.

“Come say hi to Sam,” Dean says now. “He read your last paper.”

Chuck looks behind Dean at Sam, who’s discussing video rights with another chaser, and decides that this is not the time. Not the day. “Sorry,” Chuck says. “I need to get back to the truck. We’re packing it in today.”

Chuck’s never been good at confronting forces of nature in person.

* * *

Chuck’s grant review is going great, right up until the moment when he has to get into the room with the committee and they ask him about seeing a tornado.

Which? Chuck hasn’t.

Ever.

Chuck likes sitting in the Doppler truck. It’s hot and sweaty so he never gets cold, and he gets to crouch over computers and direct other people towards the storms. And most importantly, he gets to use the Doppler radar to make _100% fucking sure_ that the storms are nice and far away from him. Sure, he gets the thunder and lightning. There was that one time when they didn’t move fast enough to get away from the baseball-sized hail. But Chuck stays away from the tornadoes. They keep the Doppler away from the tornadoes. It’s all about protecting the research equipment.

That isn’t what the committee wants to hear. They want romance. The thrill of the chase. The terror and awe of the finger of God, destroying barns and farms before him.

So Chuck pivots, tries to explain what it’s like in the field. Someone has to be with the Doppler, after all, ideally the person with the most meteorological experience. Chuck? Is a Professor of Meteorology. He’s the one leading the team. He’s the one deploying the team. Does it really matter that he’s managed to avoid seeing a single tornado in three years of field work?

He thinks he managed to pull it out of the ditch right up until he gets the email informing him that the committee has chosen another grant to fund for next season.

That evening, Chuck decides to get drunk in the key of _why do they let liberal arts majors decide on science funding_. Tries to drink away his regret at not bringing one of his grad students along to the grant presentation. Any one of Chuck’s grad students could have sold the wonder and majesty of the fucking storms.

It’s not like his students will be out of a job. Chuck’s good — one of the best meteorologists in the field — and he’s good at training. His students already get approached to join other teams. They’ll all be chasing this season, out in front of the weather.

But Chuck. Chuck is beginning to realize how screwed he is.

He’s not going to lose his professorship. His research publications have been too good for that. But he’s got the parts for thirty next-generation probes sitting in his lab, waiting for assembly, and without the funds to pay for the Doppler to find the tornadoes and grad student salaries to deploy them — well. Not like they’re going to gather paradigm-shifting tornado data from the lab, unless Chuck gets really, really fucking unlucky and his lab gets hit by a tornado. And wouldn’t that be a story for the news — Maryland Tornado Prof Killed By Freak Tornado.

Chuck cracks open another beer and opens YouTube to the Storm Facers. They’ve kept the same intro from when they started chasing, and it’s shitty. On the screen, Sam jumps out of the Impala with a camera and dramatically faces a thunderstorm — jump cut to Dean looking at a busted window and shaking his head while the camera pans down to baseball-sized hailstones on the ground. Jump cut to a shot of a twister.

But it’s a beautiful fucking shot of the twister, spinning in a field. It starts visibly heading towards them and then the camera angle drops to show the asphalt, bobbing as whoever’s holding the camera runs toward the car.

He watches the episode. He remembers this tornado. He was thirty miles away, staked out by the side of the road to get the data to help his team deploy sensors in another storm. They got decent data that day, too.

“Because I was doing my fucking job,” Chuck says, getting up for another beer. Another episode of Storm Facers. Another set of glory shots of the Impala — are they tornado chasers or freaking classic car nuts?

He’s _mumble_ beers in, slumped across his bed with the laptop playing at him, when he hears something that makes him sit up.

Sam’s facing the camera. He sweeps his ridiculous hair away from his eyes. “So!” he says. “This is exciting news — my brother Dean is getting married!”

He reaches out, grabs the camera from Dean and faces it towards him. “So, man, you excited?”

“Get that camera off of me,” Dean says, gruff — hah, as if; Chuck knows Dean well enough in person to know he’s probably loving the attention.

“So this is our announcement,” Sam says, from behind the camera. “Dean’s going to be hanging up his storm-chasing hat, and taking the Impala to a well-deserved retirement.”

“Do you know how many windshields I’ve replaced on that poor car?” Dean asks. The video leaves him in voiceover, and cuts to a pan-shot of the Impala with shattered windows. And another shot, with dents in the side and golf-ball sized hail on the ground. “It’s more repair than car. She deserves a good life.”

“Yeah,” Sam says. “You know you loved it.”

The shot cuts back to show Dean. “I did,” he says. “I still do. But it’s time for a new chapter in my life. Storm Facers, keep facing the storms!”

Their sign-off. The end of every episode. Chuck takes it as his cue to drink while the outro plays over a series of tornado clips.

There’s more videos on the channel after that one, but they’re mostly clips and compilations. Top Ten Tornadoes Near Cows Who Run Away. That sort of thing.

Chuck hits pause and flops back against his pillows. Takes another swig of beer.

He wonders if Sam is going to be chasing this year.

And that’s when he gets his terrible idea.

He’s drunk enough for it to seem like a really good idea, though. Sam is without a chase partner. Chuck needs to see a fucking tornado, so he can get back in front of the grant committee next year and spin them a story ripped from the freaking headlines. _Scientist witnesses tornado. IS 100% BETTER AT RESEARCH._ For fucking reasons, or whatever.

He has Sam’s cell number in his phone. It’s nine-thirty Chuck time, but Sam’s two hours behind.

Chuck picks up his phone and calls before he has too much time to think.

Sam picks up right away. “Hello, Sam Winchester.”

“Sam? Hey. This is Chuck Shurley.”

“Oh! Hey, Professor Shurley.”

“It’s Chuck.” He swallows. “Look, this might be off the wall or whatever, but… do you want to chase with me this season?”

Sam pauses for a minute. “You mean join your team? With the DOW? I’ve never hunted with Doppler before. That would be amazing, man.”

“Uh.” Shit. “Yeah, uh. I don’t know how to say this, but there’s no DOW this year.”

“Wait, what?” Sam’s voice fades out and then comes back.

“Funding,” Chuck says. “Um.” _Because I’m too chickenshit to go look at tornadoes._

“What the hell? Your papers are amazing. What were they thinking?”

“Yeah, I don’t know,” Chuck says. “Apparently you have to appreciate the majesty of nature to be a scientist these days or whatever.”

Sam pauses. “Are you okay?”

Chuck laughs. It is the laugh of a scientist who is not okay.

The entire story tumbles out — the grant committee and all.

“Shit, man,” Sam says at the end of it. “So, what — you want to head out there and hunt up a tornado to watch?”

Chuck really, really doesn’t.

“It’s the only thing I can think of,” he says. “I mean. Other than moving into a mine and going into geology or something.”

They both think about that. “You couldn’t drink enough to keep up with the geologists,” Sam says.

“Yeah. You see my problem.”

Sam’s quiet.

“I’ll pay all the bills,” Chuck says. “Hotel rooms. Food. Gas. I’ll bring the car. I mean, it’s not going to be steak dinners or anything, but —”

“If you knew the kind of shit Dean eats on the road you wouldn’t be worried about me having standards.”

“So you’ll think about it?” Chuck asks.

 “Don’t need to,” Sam says. “I’m in.”

* * *

Sam texts him for the first time that night, after Chuck’s fallen asleep in his beer- and anxiety-fueled haze.

The text is there when Chuck opens his sticky eyes in the morning. _Hey. Do you mind if I keep rights to footage we shoot? I am in either way just wanted to ask_

It takes Chuck a minute to loop back to last night and remember what happened, which brings on a full-body cringe.

 _fine with me_ , he texts back.

The rest of the planning takes place over text, too. Chuck’s not sure if he could still go through with this if he had to call Sam on the phone and think about what he’s doing here. But answering a few texts, in between classes and meeting with his TAs and grading the midterms for his upper-level synoptic class and writing another grant proposal for new sensor arrays for his next generation of probes — that doesn’t feel like real planning.

He wraps up stuff he wraps up every year. Grades. Evaluations. All of it going in early, because the academic calendar doesn’t work well with tornado season. His work-study student has done a reasonably proficient job assembling his probes and Chuck figures why not and plans to bring them along.

But there’s other stuff that’s not like normal. Instead of getting the university’s liability releases signed by his grad students, he’s texting Sam about packing lists. Instead of checking with the DOW people, he’s checking with his cell carrier to make sure he’s not going to get screwed on data charges, since they’ll have to suck down radar data from the National Weather Service all day.

Over text, he and Sam decide on a vehicle (Chuck’s SUV — Chuck refuses to get near a tornado in Sam’s tiny Prius, which he knows about only because Dean’s mockery of the car featured heavily in at least one episode of Storm Facers after the Impala lost yet another windshield).

Sam sends a photo of what he’s bringing with him — two duffles, one laptop bag. Chuck estimates the volume of the bags to try to figure out how much room they have left in the SUV and then ups the volume estimate once he remembers that Sam is enormous and probably should not be used as a scale bar.

Finally, there’s no more excuses. No more reasons to stay in Maryland. The season’s already underway.

Sam texts him with a time and place to meet, and Chuck starts his drive to Kansas.

* * *

Chuck’s watching Sam grab his bags from under the bus, and he knows that this is all a terrible idea.

It’s not even because of the tornadoes. It’s because somehow, in all the texting and planning and trying to keep his head afloat with a hole blown in his research schedule, he managed to forget that Sam is — like. Seriously hot.

 _Seriously_ hot and it’s wildly inappropriate for Chuck to be thinking that way about — what is Sam? Not a student, not an employee, but then Chuck’s paying for all of their travel costs and shit, he has not budgeted for two rooms. Sam did the numbers to estimate how long they could stay out and all those numbers assumed one room. One room, two beds. Not good.

Sam lifts the bags, easy, like they’re not enormous and probably packed with heavy shit. “Hey, man,” he says, coming back over to Chuck. “You ready for this?”

“Most definitely not,” Chuck says, and he’s talking about Sam, but Sam must think he’s talking about the tornadoes.

Sam gets this serious expression in his eyes. “Hey,” he says. “It’ll be okay. The first few days are always a wash anyway. We can get in the groove.”

“Yeah,” Chuck says. Sam handed him his laptop bag when he got off the bus. Chuck’s gripping the handle so tight he’s losing feeling in his hands. “Yeah, I know.”

“So where’s the car?” Sam asks.

Chuck shakes his head and then looks up. “What? Yeah, sorry, right over there.” He leads Sam to the SUV, opens the hatch and lets Sam load the bags in — he left space, next to the rack he had one of his grad students build for the sensors. (Casey. Good guy. He’s going out with a different DOW team this year.)

“So how was the bus ride from Colorado?” Chuck asks, because he feels like he needs to make conversation.

“Fine,” Sam says, checking that everything’s in and closing the hatch. “I mean, you know… it’s pretty nice to get out.”

“You must need a lot of legroom,” Chuck says.

Sam laughs. “Yeah, something like that. It’ll be nice being in a new car. Dean loves the Impala, but the seats aren’t exactly designed for the kind of driving we do, you know?”

“Yeah,” Chuck says. “Hey, you want to drive?”

“Whatever you want,” Sam says. “You probably want to start looking at the maps, right?”

Chuck tosses him the spare key and Sam gets in on the driver’s side and has to adjust the seat, way back from where Chuck had it. “Dean never let me drive, you know.”

Chuck does know, because he’s watched way more episodes of Storm Facers than he is ever going to admit.

They get on the road and Chuck gets himself buried in the National Weather Service data, which is a familiar and comforting place to be while the world spins away as Sam drives them down to the area where they are hoping storms might hit tomorrow.

The hotel room isn’t as awkward as Chuck feared. He hits the hay early, to the sound of Sam watching a documentary on orcas on some cable channel Chuck’s never heard of. Sam asks if it’s bugging him but Chuck lives in a university town and he’s used to noise. If he wasn’t so terrified of them, he could probably sleep through an actual tornado provided that it left his bed alone.

Sam gets up before him to go out for a run, so Chuck gets to take a shower and get dressed with the room to himself. When Sam comes back in to shower, Chuck heads down to the breakfast bar — gets himself a donut and grabs two coffees.

Sam’s fully dressed when Chuck comes back upstairs. “Hey,” he says, squinting up at Chuck from his laptop screen.

Chuck puts the coffee down on the table next to him. “Didn’t know how you took it,” he says.

“Any way I can get it, this time of year,” Sam says. “Thanks.”

Chuck looks over Sam’s shoulder at the radar. It’s looking much more promising than he’d thought it would.

* * *

The first day’s storms are a washout, as is one of the roads they try to drive over.

Another hotel room, another day’s storms.

By the end of the week, Chuck’s starting to wonder if he’s got negative tornadicity or something.

“Maybe the tornadoes can tell I don’t want to see them,” he says.

They’re in the hotel room at the end of the day. Sam’s in a chair, flat-out draped over the wall-thru air conditioner, which is struggling to keep up with the thick, humid air that is bringing misery, but a striking lack of tornadoes.

“We could use you as anti-tornado bait,” Sam says. “Fly you in to major cities whenever tornado warnings get close.”

“I would get so many frequent flier miles,” Chuck says, flopping back on his bed and imagining it.

“Lucky bastard.” Sam pushes his hair back from his forehead, that way he does that always makes Chuck feel an unwelcome heat in his stomach. “I only ever get frequent driver miles. Frequent bus-rider miles.”

Chuck keeps looking over at him, but then Sam looks back and makes eye contact and Chuck — this is not supposed to be happening.

“Going to take a shower,” he mutters, grabbing the first clothes he comes to in his bag. Maybe they’re dirty. Right now he doesn’t care.

* * *

It takes Sam a few days to stop calling Chuck Professor Shurley.

He’s an intimidating dude if you’ve only known him by his research. Sam’s read all his papers, even though his ability to follow the math usually gives out somewhere around the second page. Chuck’s so good at teaching. Half the teams out here have someone who studied with Chuck, or wishes they did. He breaks things down for people when they don’t understand, never gets impatient or starts yelling.

Sam’s got a basic understanding of the dynamics of the storms — you can’t be a chaser without learning some shit about how this all works — but Chuck’s something else. It’s like he’s got a model running inside his head and every time Sam asks a question, Chuck breaks it down for him until it makes sense. He’s got a million analogies about syrup and salad dressing and sponges that cut down on the jargon and math and make things seem simple, even if it’s just for a minute or two.

They’ve seen some thunderstorms now, and one major hail event that had Chuck packing hailstones in a cooler for a colleague and the two of them struggling to find a source of dry ice and a FedEx location in rural Missouri.

Sam mostly drives while Chuck hunches over the laptop in the other seat, staring at the weather maps and the NWS forecasts.

Chuck doesn’t mind music. Any music, he doesn’t seem to care. Sam’s spent the past few years criss-crossing storm season to the tune of Dean’s classic rock, which he always pulls down from the radio because Dean likes the radio. Likes hearing the tornado warnings when they’re approaching the storm. As far as Sam’s concerned, if he never has to listen to another morning shock jock give away concert tickets on the basis of whether Caller Number Five can guess an executed prisoner’s last meal, it will be too fucking soon.

But Chuck’s fine with the iPod. Fine with anything Sam wants to listen to, in fact, which becomes clear when Sam’s iPod runs out of battery and Sam flips to the radio while it’s charging. Chuck’s fine with Taylor Swift. Sam’s playlist selections get a lot broader after that.

Chuck doesn’t care what they watch in the evenings, either. Whatever shitty documentary Sam decides on is fine. He watches or he doesn’t or he drops off to sleep. The next day they might end up discussing wild turkeys or how factories use machine screws in food production, whatever they watched the night before. There’s a lot of road to drive down. There’s a lot of time between NWS updates. They’ve got a lot of time to talk.

What Chuck doesn’t like is the storms.

Sam knew that before he came out but what he didn’t realize was how deep this runs for Chuck. They’re out in northwest Louisiana, watching a storm drop a wall cloud as pretty as any Sam’s seen, and Chuck’s looking at it through the windshield like he wants to put his fingers in front of his eyes. Like he’s rooting against a tornado.

Only storm chaser Sam’s ever seen do that.

The air’s hot and heavy and the wind’s blowing against the SUV. “Hey,” Sam says. “Do you want to go up on that ridge? Might get a better view.” If he was with Dean, they’d be two miles closer to the storm, but Sam gets that Chuck’s not going to get there today. It’s okay.

“I’m good here,” Chuck says. He’s obsessively reloading the NWS data, like it’s going to magically go high-res, get him the data set he’d be rocking in the Doppler truck.

Sam gets out of the SUV to watch, grabbing the camera just in case. He’s not really planning on anything with this footage — it’s nice, knowing that he’s not going to be spending the evening editing together an episode of Storm Facers while Dean breathes down his neck and demands that he only show the Impala from her best angles. But old habits. He’s used to watching tornadoes through the lens.

The storm throws around some lightning, and for a moment, it looks like something’s rotating. Like something’s going to drop.

But no. It falls apart.

Sam realizes that he’s relieved. A little. He doesn’t want to leave the road just yet.

* * *

They drive further that night, to get themselves set up for the next day’s potential storms.

When they get to the motel, there’s other chasers in town, which means they’re almost sold out. “I got one king-size,” the clerk tells Chuck. “Take it or leave it.”

The next motel is thirty miles down the road. Chuck takes it.

“I’ll take the floor,” he tells Sam, coming back out to the SUV to meet him. “Or the couch. Whatever.”

“What are you talking about?” Sam takes the key card.

“They only had a king.” Chuck knew they shouldn’t have driven so long; they could have gotten up earlier tomorrow, gotten a jump on the long drive northwest to the next set of storms. But now — yeah, they both need sleep.

“Oh,” Sam says. “That’s not a problem. You don’t need to sleep on the floor, man.”

“We can keep driving,” Chuck says. “Get a new hotel. I can take a turn driving.”

“You’re overreacting,” Sam says. “Don’t worry. It’s fine. Or — do I, like, snore or something? Is there some reason you’re not willing to share a bed with me?”

Sam doesn’t snore. The only reason Chuck doesn’t want to share a bed with him is that Chuck really, really wants to share a bed with him, and not in the “they’re packing grad students four to a room and it’s the last bed in town” kind of a way.

But there’s no way to say that.

“You’re right,” Chuck says, instead. “I’m overreacting.”

“Okay,” Sam says, and hefts all their bags at once, a show of strength that is _not helping_ Chuck with keeping his feelings about this bed-sharing thing platonic.

Chuck goes to bed early and tells Sam to keep the TV on, it’s not bugging him. It’s true; the documentary Sam’s watching on lemurs isn’t the problem. The problem is the lack of a couch. The lack of a chair that isn’t a shitty rolling desk chair with a broken wheel. The fact that Chuck can feel Sam next to him on the mattress, the air gap between them powerless against the way the mattress springs move when Sam does. Chuck can’t turn it off, that awareness that Sam’s right there. Right next to him.

Sam watches two more half-hour shows but Chuck still falls asleep after him.

* * *

Their alarm clock is set for a sleep-in type of wake up, because the storms today don’t look like they’ll be getting interesting until late afternoon and anyway, Chuck and Sam are most of the way there already.

But Chuck wakes up with the sunrise. They pulled the curtains last night but they’re crappy hotel curtains, which means that any light outside leads to a dull gloom inside the room.

Sam left the air conditioning unit on its highest setting when he went to bed last night, but Chuck’s warm, because he’s rolled up against Sam, who’s still asleep, on his back, breathing shallowly and evenly.

Before Chuck’s entirely awake, he lets himself enjoy the feeling — he’s on his side, back up against Sam, and he can feel Sam breathing, and he’s warm and he feels safe.

He doesn’t want to move. Doesn’t want to get up. It’s not like they need to get up. It’s not even that late.

Chuck lets himself drift. Keeps himself still, lets himself enjoy Sam’s warmth against him under the sheet.

And then Sam starts moving.

“Shit, man,” he mumbles, rolling away from Chuck. “Are you —”

Chuck keeps his eyes closed. Tries to keep his breathing shallow.

Sam pauses, and then Chuck feels the mattress shift under him as Sam gets up and leaves only the warmth behind him.

Chuck decides that he is definitely staying in this bed and _being asleep_ or at least pretending really hard at being asleep until Sam at least gets out of the shower. But while Sam’s showering he drifts off to sleep again, because they really have been pulling some late nights and abusing the coffee.

When Chuck wakes up again, it’s to the sound of Sam’s key card in the door lock. He’s carrying donuts and bananas and coffee.

Sam sets everything down on the hotel desk and then looks over at Chuck, who’s blinking up at him.

“Hey,” Sam says. “Did I wake you up last night?”

“You were fine,” Chuck says, feeling the burn of shame because he knows he should have moved away, he’s sure of it now, and what the fuck, half-asleep Chuck?

“I didn’t get handsy or something?” Sam asks. “Uh. Look, I’m sorry if I did.”

“It’s fine,” Chuck says. Like he’s not the one who stayed snuggled up against Sam. He’s the one who should be apologizing here. “Hey, thanks for the coffee.”

Sam hands it over and Chuck sits up enough to start drinking.

“So how do the models look?” Chuck asks.

Sam turns back to the desk and opens up the laptop. “I was just about to check.”

Chuck finishes his coffee while Sam focuses in on the models. Chuck’s the real meteorologist here, but you don’t storm chase for as long as Sam has without picking up the basics.

“Hey,” Sam says. “This is looking promising.”

He passes the laptop over to Chuck, who starts studying the forecast discussion and agrees.

Maybe today’s the day he gets to see a tornado.

* * *

At first they just need to head west, a bit further, but then they have to make a choice, northwest or southwest, and even the huge-ass coffee Chuck had Sam stop for isn’t helping with the decision because they’re both potentially awesome cells. They both have the ability to pop tornadoes. Chuck believes in both of them. (Chuck is scared of both of them.)

“Just make a call, man,” Sam says, from the driver’s side. He doesn’t look at the laptop while he’s driving.

Chuck frets over the decision for another few miles, until Sam tells him they have to decide, and then he makes the call on the basis of the roadways. The northwest cell is heading towards an area with several rivers and Chuck has had way too many grad students run into downed bridges and shit to want to hunt there if they have another choice.

So. Southwest it is, to a nice flat county with no significant bodies of water on the map, and lovely farm roads gridding it out.

They stop for lunch late, because Chuck’s done the math and they can afford the time to go inside and eat at an actual table. They’re off the main interstate, driving down a secondary highway through county seats, and there aren’t a lot of options. Burger King and Subway. McDonalds and Subway. Kate’s Kountry Kitchen and Subway. Chuck’s usually pretty flexible but the smell of Subway turns his stomach. Finally they go for a McDonald’s because in the town they’re driving through, it’s that or the Dairy Queen, and Sam says he needs caffeine to drive any further.

The woman behind the counter rings them up — salad for Sam, fries and burger and shake for Chuck because if this is going to be the day he sees a tornado, he’s preparing for it like it might be his last lunch, and damn does he hope his last lunch isn’t going to be from McDonalds.

“You heard there’s a tornado watch,” the woman says, while they wait for Chuck’s burger to come up.

Chuck nods.

“Can’t wait for summer to be over,” the woman says. “Every damn year it’s tornado warning. Tornado watch. Freaks me out every time.”

“Yeah,” Chuck says. He can sympathize.

The woman looks behind them at the sky as she adds Chuck’s burger and then pushes the tray towards them. “Well. You both stay safe, now.”

“Thanks,” Chuck says, as Sam collects the tray.

They find a table in the corner.

Sam opens up the cover on his salad and starts mixing it, adding a bit of the dressing. “You know there’s not a chance in hell that storm cell’s going to get within 10 miles of here,” he says, looking over at the woman behind the counter.

“I’m a meteorologist, not a prophet,” Chuck says. His shake’s too cold, too thick to pull up the straw. He sets it down and starts unwrapping the burger. “I could be wrong.”

“You’re usually not, though. You could have told her.”

Chuck shrugs, uncomfortably. “And then what if she doesn’t take the next warning seriously? Or what if she goes home after her shift and she lives twenty miles away? Or what if she calls her mother who lives —”

“I get it,” Sam says, putting up his hands.

The watch gets upgraded to a warning while they’re eating, which they find out about because Chuck’s phone gives them the alert. They can hear other phones, behind the register, ringing.

“Town must be too small for a siren,” Sam says, grabbing their tray. Chuck grabs his milkshake and they’re back out in the SUV again, hunched over the laptop staring at the radar while the air conditioning desperately tries to cool and dry the air.

Sam drives.

Chuck’s milkshake isn’t helping.

* * *

Sam sees Chuck get tenser as they head toward the supercell. It’s strengthening — definitely the right choice on Chuck’s part if he wants to see a tornado.

They stick to the asphalt roads, trying to keep themselves somewhere ahead of the storm’s track. The sky’s loading with clouds. Big clouds. Towering clouds. Mountains of water vapor getting ready to rain down hell on the earth.

And then the cell’s ahead of them — dark clouds smeared across the horizon, shot with the spark of lightning. They’re still inside the SUV. Too far to hear the thunder.

Sam pulls over a mile or so earlier than he’d push in if he were with Dean and the Impala.

When Sam looks over at Chuck, he’s still hunched over the laptop.

“Hey.”

Chuck doesn’t look up. “Winds are getting stronger,” he says, refreshing the radar. But there’s no new data there.

“Yeah,” Sam says. “It’s a pretty one.” He turns off the engine and rolls down the window on the driver’s side.

The air coming into the SUV is heavy, laden down with moisture and ozone.

“Hey,” Sam says, after another few minutes watching the lightning against the storm and waiting for Chuck to get out. “You okay, man?”

Chuck looks up, but at Sam, not at the storm. “Yeah, I’m fine. Just… checking the map.”

They’re on a straight road, still paved, so they have two exit routes from this thing — further on or back the way they came. Sam and Dean used to box themselves in all the time, turn down a dirt road with nothing but a wild guess of whether it’s going to continue on, going to hook up with another road that you can use to get out of a bad situation with a tree or a power line or a tornado.

But with Chuck, Sam’s been playing it safe. Sam has the sense that Chuck would only watch storms from crossroads if he could get away with it. (Or not at all. If he could get away with it.)

“Hey,” Sam says. “Do you mind if I get out to film? Get a closer look?”

Chuck looks up at the storm now, finally. It’s getting closer and the clouds below are starting to get messy — scud. Or maybe, if they’re lucky, a wall.

“I’m fine,” he says, looking back down to the laptop screen.

Sam takes one more look at Chuck and then gets out to pop the hatch and get the good camera. The body of the camera is already covered with a freezer-strength ziploc, because he and Dean learned that lesson the hard way, a few times over. They make specialty camera covers you can buy, but the ziploc is both cheap and infinitely replaceable.

It’s still not raining, but outside the SUV, Sam can hear the thunder, crackling in the distance as the storm throws lightning between clouds, and down onto the farmland below.

Sam leans back against the warm metal of the SUV and just films for a while. He thinks about setting up the tripod, trying to get a time-lapse exposure of this one, but he’s got the sense that Chuck may want to flee and he doesn’t want anything to slow down that crucial process if the storm does get closer than he’s expecting.

Finally — finally — the storm starts dropping a real wall, and there’s a bulge downwards, the clouds starting to rotate into something organized, something dropping down towards the earth.

“Hey,” Sam says, coming around to Chuck’s side of the SUV and rapping on the window. “This is what you came for.”

Chuck rolls down the window without looking up at Sam. Glares down at the laptop, and then sets it on the center console. “Do I have to get out?”

Sam keeps the camera steady on the developing storm. “Whatever you’re comfortable with, man.”

So Chuck stays inside the SUV, and Sam keeps the camera steady while the storm tries to drop a funnel. It hesitates for a while — trying to drop, and then finally roping out without having touched down.

* * *

It doesn’t feel any different once the funnel ropes out. No drop in temperature. They’re not actually past the cell, not yet, but the shitty low-res NWS radar data Chuck has to work with tells him the storm’s getting weaker.

“We should move,” Sam says, finally. “It’s getting closer.”

“Yeah.” Chuck rolls up both windows and Sam puts the camera on the back seat before getting back into the driver’s side. “Storm’s coming through.”

They have to detour south before they can get back to the main roads, so they get caught in the rain, thick drops on the SUV under a black sky. Thunder so close it sounds like the gods themselves are smacking the roof of the car like it’s an anvil.

This part doesn’t bug Chuck — not like the tornadoes do, anyway. He’s been through some hellacious thunderstorms in the Doppler truck, for all that they try to keep the pricey equipment away from the worst of the weather. As long as he’s got enough radar data to confirm that the tornado risk is past, Chuck’s okay.

Sam’s driving slow — it’s still high winds, unpredictable weather, the sort of thing that might not rip a tree up by the roots and launch it through the air at you, but still might encourage a tree to give in to the storm and slump down over the roadway in front of you.

“So that’s what you came here to see,” Sam says, finally, once they’re out of the worst of it and it’s just a regular storm.

“Yeah,” Chuck says.

He’s not sure how he feels. He doesn’t feel different. He doesn’t feel like he’s come face to face with the merciless nature of vorticity, or whatever the fuck it was the grant committee thought he ought to be doing.

“You going to head back to the lab now?” Sam asks.

Chuck thinks Sam sounds a bit disappointed, but then Chuck probably wants to think that.

“I mean.” Chuck’s not sure how to say this. “It’s not like it was a real tornado.”

“Yeah, man,” Sam says. “Didn’t even touch down.”

“Yeah.”

“What if they ask you about that?” Sam asks. “You probably should stay out here. Maybe one more tornado. Just to be safe.”

“Yeah,” Chuck says.

One more storm. Just a little more hunting with Sam. There’s a good set of storms coming down the trans-continental conveyor belt tomorrow.

One more.

Just to be safe.

* * *

Chuck comes out of the Chipotle and slides into the seat next to Sam. “Drive now, eat later?”

“Drive now, eat now,” Sam says.

“There was a guy in the Chipotle who was taller than you,” Chuck says, unwrapping his burrito.

“They’re out there.” Sam sets his bowl on the center console and pulls into traffic. “Few of them, anyway.”

Sam doesn’t ask what he wants to ask — _So what, am I too tall?_ — because the implication there is that there’s a too tall for Chuck and also that Chuck cares about that. Sam doesn’t want to think about that.

It’s not like Sam is intimidated by Chuck the way he is at first. But he’s still aware that they’re in very different places. Chuck is, like, an adult. He’s got a career doing shit and helping people. Sam’s got a YouTube channel whose hits have crashed and burned and no other backup plans for what he wants to do.

So Sam’s not going to think about it. Driving and balancing a burrito bowl takes up all his attention, anyway.

* * *

The storms the next day are huge. They’d be spectacular if they weren’t wrapped in rain, which is a wild card Chuck is not comfortable confronting head-on. They set up far away instead and Sam takes some time-lapse exposures of the storms coming in.

Sam’s shots come out _amazing_ — he lets Chuck watch them on the laptop that night. It was a pretty storm. An awesome angle.

And they didn’t actually see the tornado, so they get to keep chasing. It’s starting to feel like a reward instead of a punishment. A little bit. Mostly the part where Chuck gets to stay on the road with Sam.

A few days later they’re in Kansas — classic storm territory — and they manage to get near a small storm. They drop some sensors because hey, why not? And then the storm comes down over a farm road, scaring the cattle away and making Chuck grab at Sam’s arm until he backs the SUV way down, because it’s faster than turning the SUV around.

The twister comes slowly, perpendicular to the road, and passes in front of them. Chuck’s willing to get out of the car this time, while Sam films from the other side. They’re on the dry side of the storm, and it’s about as pretty a view of a twister as you could ask for until it ropes out, just past the road.

It misses the sensors. Goes right between two of them. Chuck knew he should have deployed five but they were already running out of time to get down the road far enough to be out of the path of travel.

So Chuck’s seen a tornado now.

They collect the sensors, Chuck checking that they’re powered off and stowing them back in their rack. They don’t talk about it until they’re driving away.

“You didn’t get any data,” Sam says.

“Yeah.” Chuck’s looking down at the laptop again, looking for the next batch of storms.

“I mean, you saw a storm, but it’s kind of a shame to stop before you’ve got the data.” Sam’s keeping his eyes on the road. “We could keep going. Try to get you a probe in an actual storm.”

Chuck nods. He’s got next-next-generation tornado probes to buy and assemble. That takes more grant money, which is easier to ask for if he can demonstrate the ways in which his next-generation tornado probes generated data, but could generate data even better.

It’s really just about the grants. It’s not about the fact that Chuck wants to stay on the road with Sam. Not at all.

That night, the hotel night clerk gives them a king-size room again, one bed, and Chuck doesn’t even try to argue with him, just comes back out to the SUV and makes sure Sam’s okay with it. Sam shrugs and picks up their bags and Chuck figures hey, go with it.

In the morning Chuck wakes up with Sam wrapped around him. Outside, it’s raining — Chuck can hear it on the hotel roof, so it’s coming down pretty hard. Big storm. There’s a rumble of thunder and while he watches, a flash of lightning comes in around the edges of the hotel curtain.

This is the point where last season’s Chuck would jump out of bed and check the radar to make sure there’s no unforecast storm cells that have strengthened to tornado-quality overnight.

But getting out of bed right now — hell, even reaching for his phone might wake up Sam. Sam’s tired. It’s not fair to wake him up.

Chuck is like ninety percent certain that waking Sam up is the wrong thing to do here.

Chuck lets himself snuggle back up against Sam and drop off again, while the thunder rumbles from the outside world.

* * *

They’re chasing a thunderstorm in Kentucky when it hits the power lines and blows out enough cell towers that they both lose cell reception and data.

Chuck’s freaking out because not having the DOW’s radar data is _bad enough_ as far as he’s concerned. Not having access to NWS data and radar _or even just the damn storm warnings_ is freaking catastrophic and terrifying to him. He’s reconciling himself to looking at storms from a distance with proper safety protocols but those protocols all rely on data and now the data’s gone and Chuck doesn’t —

“Hey.” Chuck feels Sam’s hand on his back, tentative at first and then rubbing in circles. “It’s okay.”

“It is _not okay_ ,” Chuck says.

They were running ahead of the storm — mostly because Sam’s got this quixotic devotion to getting one of Chuck’s sensors into a tornado before the end of the season. Chuck’s okay with the sensors being just an excuse for them to keep chasing, but Sam doesn’t know that.

So now they can run ahead of the storm, only it’s moving fast and what if they hit a bridge out or something? Or they can run perpendicular to the storm but that has the same bridge issue and also what if the storm’s throwing a tornado in that direction.

Chuck’s hyperventilating too hard to enjoy the feel of Sam’s hand on his back.

“Breathe, man,” Sam says. “Let’s reason this out.” He reaches over with the hand that’s not touching Chuck and snaps on the radio. It’s playing Taylor Swift. He turns the volume low.

“We’ll hear it on the radio if they call a warning,” Sam says. “They hadn’t issued a tornado warning for the cell yet when we drove in. Okay?”

“Okay,” Chuck says. He takes a deep breath and starts doing the math in his head. The GPS is still working, sort of, so he checks out the roadways. _If the tornado chasers are ten miles ahead of a storm coming at them at 35 miles per hour, and they can only run on twisting roads, which direction do they run and do they survive the day?_

They shouldn’t have taken this storm into Kentucky anyway. The roads are shit and the only bonus is that Sam might get footage of horses running away from a storm instead of cows.

“We run north,” Chuck says now, because it’s the direction with the best roads. “It’s perpendicular to the storm but there’s a bunch of eastbound roads we can bug out on if we need to.”

“Sounds like a plan.” Sam takes away his hand from Chuck’s back and starts the SUV.

Chuck can’t stare down at the laptop screen, so he stares at his phone instead, willing the little icon that tells him he has cell data to start up again.

They get out of the storm. It doesn’t throw down any tornadoes, in the end. It does some damage, but no more than any average summer thunderstorm.

When Chuck gets his cell data back he feels like kissing the laptop screen.

* * *

Their clean clothing runs out at the same time that the conveyor belt of warm, moist air decides to take a day off, giving them a day with no promising instabilities. No storms worth chasing. They find a laundromat on Yelp and then head to a second laundromat after Chuck refuses to go into the first one, which is in a really bad part of town and also sells alcohol. Creepy.

The upscale laundromat isn’t fancy or anything. They’ve got the same fiberglass chairs as the lower-end place. Chuck stuffs all his shit into one of the huge machines and sets it going while Sam sorts his stuff into a couple smaller washers.

“What?” Chuck asks, when Sam side-eyes Chuck’s huge washer before slumping down in the shitty chair next to him. “Are you judging my laundry abilities?”

“None of my business,” Sam says.

Chuck actually just wanted to see a machine that huge in operation. It’s shorter than Sam, because most things are, but put it up on cinderblocks and it’d be taller than Chuck.

“The machine at home is smaller,” Chuck mutters.

“A machine at home?” Sam says. “So fancy.”

“Yeah, it’s a garden of earthly delights,” Chuck says. Actually he’s got a crappy condo; his parents said he needed to buy a place when he finally made it to tenure track, but he’s never had any interest in keeping up a garden or a yard. The place came with a washer and dryer, part of the sale.

Chuck lets himself zone out, staring at his laundry getting tossed back and forth inside the machine. It’s soaping more than Sam’s machines. Maybe he used the wrong soap. Maybe he used too much.

“So how did you end up in tornado science?” Sam asks.

Chuck shrugs. “You know how it is. You start out in paleoclimate, but all the sexy grants are for the weather that’s killing us now, not the weather that killed the dinosaurs.” And before you know it, you’re hiding in the Doppler truck from the storms you’re supposed to be studying.

“So you didn’t watch Twister and decide to get into the game?”

“Shit, no,” Chuck says.

They watch the machines for a bit longer before Chuck realizes something: in all the episodes of Storm Facers he’s watched, and in all the time he’s spent on the road with Sam, he’s never figured out why Sam and Dean went into storm chasing.

“So what about you?” he asks. “How did you get into this?”

Sam’s face goes still for a moment. “Um. It was my mom.”

Chuck can tell there’s more to this story, but he doesn’t know if he should ask or back off or —

“She died in a tornado,” Sam says. “Back when I was only a baby.”

“Shit,” Chuck says, in a sudden what-do-you-say panic. “Shit. I’m sorry.”

“Yeah, well.” Sam shrugs. “I didn’t really get to know her. It was harder on Dean. And really hard on my dad. He moved us from Kansas to Colorado that year.”

“Not exactly getting you out of the tornado zone,” Chuck says. He doesn’t hunt in western Colorado, but that has nothing to do with the frequency of tornadoes — it’s all about the terrain, which is unforgiving. Mountains and hills are not a tornado chaser’s friends.

“Yeah, well, he didn’t realize that,” Sam says. “I think he just wanted to get out of Kansas.”

“Yeah.” Chuck’s keeping his eyes on the laundry machines. “I’m sorry, man.”

“He got really weird,” Sam says after a bit. “Once I got a little older. Started going all survivalist. He kept dragging Dean and me off to these weekends where they make you, like, survive in the woods, and some woman tells you how to can butter.”

“I didn’t think you could can butter.”

Sam laughs. “Yeah. Not if you want to be safe, but that’s not what it was about. I think it was more about — control? Like. Knowing that you could handle things if stuff went sideways.” He gestures around the laundromat. “All of this. The machines and the electricity.”

“So is he still —” Chuck’s not sure what he’s trying to ask. Still alive? Still a survivalist?

“He died a few years back,” Sam says. “Cancer.”

“I’m sorry,” Chuck says again, and this time he does turn his face towards Sam. But he’s not sure what else to say.

“Yeah, well.” Sam shrugs. “Dean took it pretty hard. He kept working on the Impala and — let me tell you, that car did not need more work. And then one day there was a tornado watch issued and he wanted to, like, hide me down in the basement all day, and shit, I’d just seen my dad spend his entire life preparing for something that never came, you know? So I said, let’s go looking for that fucker. Let’s go watch it. Let’s go laugh in its face.”

Chuck’s still not sure what to say, but he lets his shoulder press up against Sam’s. Gives it a bit of a push.

“And that’s how we found our first tornado,” Sam says. He’s not moving away from Chuck.

“You never said anything about this on the show,” Chuck says.

“It didn’t fit the brand,” Sam says, in a voice that Chuck knows is Sam repeating something Dean used to say.

“I didn’t realize —” Chuck stops, realizing that saying _I didn’t realize YouTube stars cared about their brand_ is going to be both wrong and a dick move.

“Eighty percent of the shit on the show that people ask me about is all the brand,” Sam says. “Dean used to breathe down the back of my neck about it. And I mean he wasn’t wrong or anything, but it got frustrating after a while, always signing off with the damn catchphrase.”

“You must miss him,” Chuck says, without really thinking about it. "Dean, I mean."

“Yeah.” Sam’s still staring at his laundry. The machines have shifted to the spin cycle, and there are walls of soap bubbles obscuring the view. “It’s cool to be doing my own thing, and all? But it’s weird without him.”

Chuck wants to ask if he’s part of the weirdness but he doesn’t actually want to know the truth. “So. Dean getting married.”

“Yeah, and that’s a trip and a half,” Sam says. “But he’s happy. He’s really happy.”

* * *

It’s another week before they hit the perfect storm.

Southeastern South Dakota. A lovely little storm cell in an area with farmland and a zillion farm roads and no recent flooding to knock out the bridges. It’s moving slow, which lets them salt the roadway with probes at nice short intervals before they retreat to the south to watch it go by.

It puts down the prettiest little tornado, down into the fields, tearing up nothing but crops and grass. It crosses the road about a mile down from them, but it’s a flat road and they have great visibility for Sam’s camera. The tornado sucks across the road, right where the probes were. They have to have gotten one inside.

Sam offers to take a picture of Chuck in front of the tornado, to show the grant committee, but Chuck’s not down with taking a photo posing with something that might kill someone, so he passes.

Once the storm is past, they drive back down the road, picking up probes and checking them over and shutting them off and setting them back in the rack. _And there’s one missing_. The tornado ate it up and let it gather data from inside the belly of the beast.

Now it’s just the question of — where? Where did the tornado spit it out? Chuck has tracking tags in his probes for just this situation but he wasn’t really expecting to score a direct hit, especially not from a smaller storm like this one where the twister’s a pretty small target. He has to dig through the crap in the back of the SUV before he tracks down the equipment he needs to trace it.

They end up leaving the SUV with the flashers on by the road and tracking into fields, muddy and torn up, and walking by cows who are still pretty freaked by the experience and run away from them. Chuck’s shoes get covered in mud and Sam falls on his ass when he steps in, like, a gopher hole.

But they find the probe. And it got the data.

Sam insists on taking a selfie of them, faces together, wet and muddy, with the probe held triumphantly in Chuck’s hands. Both of them grinning ear-to-ear.

Chuck waffles over setting it as his lock screen before deciding, fuck it, Sam will assume he’s happy about the probe.

He _is_ happy about the probe.

Sam’s driving them away when Chuck realizes that this might mean that’s it — that’s the last thing they had on their list.

Sam signals to turn onto the highway and Chuck flops back in the seat. “I can’t believe I got that data set.” (He’s already downloaded it to the laptop and started it syncing to his backup. He is not losing this data.)

“It’s awesome,” Sam says, and he seems genuinely happy for Chuck but also kind of sad.

“It’s amazing,” Chuck says.

It is amazing. He’s been chasing tornadoes with a DOW and multiple grad students in a second vehicle and he still rarely got this type of direct-hit data.

It’s such good data that _there is no reason to keep chasing_.

Sam’s quiet for a while as they drive. It’s raining outside, but not an angry, thunderstormy rain.

“I mean,” Sam says. “We could try to get another set. If you wanted to. For comparison.”

“Yeah,” Chuck says. “Yeah, that would be helpful.”

* * *

Storm season is winding down.

There’s still storms, of course. Still stuff worth showing up for. But they’re moving further away, out east and up into Canada. The sure shots are mostly gone. Tornado Alley is packing up for next year. Several of the regular research teams have called it in already.

Sam and Chuck haven’t had another direct hit on a storm. Several more good tornadoes for Sam to film, and a couple near-misses. But nothing where they were able to actually get probes into the path of the storm.

Chuck comes up from the hotel breakfast bar that morning with coffee and cornflakes. Sam’s dressed already, packing up his bag. They’re headed to Kansas today — one more late-in-the-game storm that’s looking more promising than the previous week’s worth of storms.

“Thanks, man,” Sam says, taking the coffee from Chuck.

“Any time.” Chuck’s already packed, so he sits down in front of the laptop to evaluate the radar. Still promising.

Sam gets his bag loaded and ready but then he doesn’t make a move to go.

Chuck looks up from the laptop. “Storm’s still looking good.”

“Yeah,” Sam says, staring down at the plastic lid of his coffee. “That’s good.”

“So?”

“This is awkward,” Sam says.

Chuck feels himself freeze. _Shit_. Has Sam noticed that sometimes Chuck, like, stares a little too long? Holds eye contact a little too long. Chuck thought he was being subtle but maybe he’s just bad at that. He’s probably been making Sam uncomfortable and there’s no way —

“Dean’s wedding is coming up,” Sam says.

Chuck’s brain stops spinning out scenarios of doom. “His wedding?” Right. Dean’s wedding. The entire reason Sam was bored enough to come out here with Chuck in the first place.

“He called me last night, while you were in the shower. He reminded me that the bachelor party is this weekend.”

Chuck raises an eyebrow because he doesn’t know Dean that well but he’s pretty sure Dean would have said something a bit more —

“Yeah,” Sam says. “He told me to haul ass back because he’s not missing his one socially-sanctioned shot at strippers. So. Yeah.”

“That’s fine,” Chuck says. “We got some amazing data.”

“We did,” Sam says. “You’ll be out in the DOW again next season, no problem.”

_Next season._

Chuck hasn’t even been thinking about the DOW for a while now, and he knows why. “Yeah,” he says.

“So I think I need to head out after this chase,” Sam says. “But it’s just because of Dean. I’d keep chasing. Like, if you wanted to.”

“He’s your brother,” Chuck says. “I get it. And tell him congrats for me, by the way.”

* * *

As they drive away from the hotel, heading back down to Kansas, Sam’s trying not to think about the other stuff he didn’t say.

_Come with me to Dean’s wedding. He likes you a lot._

_I like you a lot._

He doesn’t even know if Chuck has someone. Back in Maryland. He never asked, because he didn’t want to know.

Chuck’s such a decent guy. He and Sam spent an evening geeking out over the data from the probe they landed in that one storm. It’s solid — but Chuck has ideas for better collection methods and he’s already got the next generation of probes planned.

He’ll get the DOW grant next year. Sam knows he will. He’ll head out with grad students in a second truck. Stay safely ensconced behind his monitors, in the DOW.

Chuck will get the data to provide early warnings for tornadoes. The sort of early warnings that prevent people from being killed in their bed by tornadoes that the forecasts missed. The kind of warnings that would have saved Sam’s mom.

Chuck’s quiet in the passenger seat, obsessively refreshing the radar data at a speed much faster than that warranted by the NWS’s update schedule.

“Do you need coffee?” Sam asks, because they’re passing a highway sign pointing the way to Starbucks and there is no time that Chuck has not needed coffee.

Chuck needs coffee.

* * *

The last storm.

It starts out like any other storm. They either spend a day frantically driving to make it to the storm in time, or kill time while the storm approaches their existing location.

This storm’s one of the ones that makes them drive frantically, as Chuck and Sam try to cut across Kansas from northeast to southwest. Kansas wasn’t designed to be driven like that. They end up staying on 70 west and then cutting down south, which takes forever but it’s still better than trying to work west from Wichita.

The line of thunderstorms is visible as they approach — towering clouds, anviling off on the upper layers of the atmosphere. It’s an unstable day, an uncertain day. The clench in Chuck’s stomach is as much for the weather as it is about Sam leaving, heading back to his regularly-scheduled life.

They stay on paved roads, running down local highways and then splitting off into tiny paved roads that exist only to get to agricultural fields.

They’re staying on the right side of the storm. Out of the rain. This is a drier storm than some of the ones they’ve chased this year, which paradoxically makes Chuck feel nervous, like things are going too well.

The storm gets tornado-warned while they’re still working their way around the back roads, trying to decide whether to risk it and head down the dirt roads to get closer. Sam’s all for it — he’s focused on the data, has the probes ready to deploy as soon as the storm decides to drop down a funnel. Chuck’s not okay with it, though. He’s seen too many research vehicles get stuck in the mud on a day like today.

They get as close as they can, on a paved road that’s running perpendicular to the likely direction of movement, and Sam gets out to get more footage. It’s a classic tornado-dropper, and Sam films as the base layer lowers down, into the UFO-shape you only see some of the time, when it’s not a high-precip storm with rain hiding all the best and most dangerous parts of the storm from view.

Sam’s still filming when the funnel drops but he backs into the SUV with the camera running and Chuck grabs the camera, starts filming out the open window while Sam runs the SUV closer to the storm’s path.

A mile down the road, Sam pulls over. “Probe?”

“Yeah,” Chuck says. “You want me to film or help?”

“Keep filming,” Sam says, so Chuck does. The fields are a little below the level of the road, so even someone as short as Chuck has a vantage point over the surrounding fields.

The air coming in the open window is humid and thick. Breathing it is like breathing in water.

Sam’s got this part down to a routine by now. He drops probes every 500 feet down the road, moving as fast as he can while Chuck stays put with the camera in the SUV.

He gets six probes out before Chuck reloads the radar data on his laptop and calls it. They need to book it down the road now, get away from this monster before it crosses.

It’s a strange thing, watching destruction through a viewfinder. Chuck can see the debris field now — the tornado’s touched down, and it’s ripping up chunks of dirt. He keeps the window open, leaning out a bit to get the storm in frame as they drive away.

Sam pulls over another mile down the road, on a small rise that lets them see the twister. It’s deceptively small from this distance and Chuck’s wondering how it’s going to hit one of the sensors.

Chuck gives Sam back the camera and they both get out to watch. Chuck thinks about how he felt about seeing a tornado at the beginning of the season, and he finds himself feeling sorry for that Chuck. So terrified of seeing a tornado. So scared of his own research.

The tornado’s a miracle of nature. An amazing proof of the laws of fluid dynamics. An awe-inspiring example of the power of water vapor. Chuck’s feeling almost fond of the tornado now, out in the middle of a field with nobody and nothing to hurt.

Sam’s got the camera trained on it, so Chuck pulls out his phone and starts snapping pictures. It’s still heading exactly the way they expect it to be heading, towards the road and the probes Sam dropped.

It’s unclear which of them notices first. It’s difficult to judge scale with a tornado. The debris field fluctuates as it moves, so if it’s getting slightly larger — is the tornado actually getting larger? Or is it just strengthening? Out in the fields, there’s no easy way to evaluate its scale.

By the time Sam and Chuck notice that the tornado’s turned, it’s heading — not exactly towards them, but at an angle that Chuck _does not like_.

“Back in the car,” Sam says, and they both get in. They’re not moving yet. It’s probably nothing, but they’re playing it safe. Sam hands Chuck the camera and Chuck keeps it trained on the tornado.

And then the tornado hits the roadway behind them, back where they dropped the probes, but it’s not heading off into the fields on the other side. It’s just getting bigger.

“Shit,” Chuck says, just when Sam turns to him to say “Does it look like —”

There’s a bright flash, under the dark skies. Not lightning. Power lines. They’re down over the road, arcing green.

“We can’t go back that way,” Sam says. He puts the SUV in drive and pulls back onto the asphalt.

They have lots of road ahead of them, lots of room to outrun the tornado.

Until they don’t.

Chuck’s the one who sees it first — yells at Sam to stop, stop driving, and Sam skids to a halt on pavement that’s still dry.

The sign.

BRIDGE OUT.

And what’s beyond the sign. Chuck can see it. The bridge really is out. The absence of bridge is right there, right in front of them. Sometimes you get lucky and the BRIDGE OUT sign is just a warning for a bridge that’s been repaired (and let’s be honest, Chuck is going to take a gamble on a questionable bridge before he’s going to take a gamble on a tornado) but this bridge is clearly and irrevocably out. There is no way across.

Another flash in the distance, behind them, orange this time, the color of _this is not lightning_. More downed power lines. And if they’re arcing, they’re live.

They’re trapped. Pinned down. They have about half a mile of running room, between the bridge and the power lines. And the tornado.

Because the tornado’s still moving towards them, down the road, casual, like _hey, heard you wanted to play?_

Sam pulls the SUV off, as close to the bridge as he can. Sets the emergency brake.

Chuck can see the tornado’s debris field in the rearview mirrors. Closer now.

“Seat belt?” Sam touches Chuck’s arm. “I know it’s not much, but.”

Chuck nods and puts his seatbelt on. It’s probably about as helpful as jumping off the Titanic with a paddleboard.

They’re in the outer winds already, sucking dirt and corn stalks and debris across the field of view behind them. The SUV’s rocking on its tires and Chuck finds himself thinking _it’s just like that, it really does sound like a freight train_.

Something big hits the SUV, rocking it, but the windows are still holding. Sam puts the camera on the dashboard, still running, and leaves it. His hand goes to Chuck’s back and pulls him in, against the seatbelt, toward the center of the SUV, toward Sam. Their heads down, away from the windows. Sam’s muttering something and Chuck can’t hear what. Maybe he’s praying.

Chuck doesn’t pray. Doesn’t see his life flash before his eyes. What he does know is that he has some serious regrets here. Some leaps he wishes he had taken.

A piece of debris _slams_ against the SUV and Chuck jumps, and Sam pulls him closer, one hand on Chuck’s back, one hand on Chuck’s head, as if that could protect either of them.

It might be thirty seconds that they’re in there. The wind. More impacts, from debris. They can’t see if the SUV’s lifting and Chuck decides he doesn’t want to know.

 And then the wind’s dropping off, just a bit. Chuck moves his head against Sam’s chest.

The tornado’s moving away from them now.

They stay in the SUV, watching the tornado cut away into the fields on the other side of the road. Sam reaches up with one hand to re-angle the camera towards the tornado, make sure it’s still running, but he doesn’t sit back. Doesn’t move away from Chuck.

They can’t leave the SUV until the power lines are fixed, or at least until they know the power’s been cut.

“We need to call the power company,” Sam says, finally. So Chuck moves all the way back to his seat and grabs the laptop from the floor where it fell and reloads the radar while Sam tries to track down the power company and let them know that they’ve got people stranded by live wires out here.

Apparently there’s a lot of live wires in town right now because from Sam’s side of the conversation, it sounds like they’re pretty far down the priority list.

“It might be a while,” Sam says, turning to Chuck.

That’s when the thunderstorm hits them. There’s a flash of lightning with the crack of thunder almost instantaneous, and then the rain’s beating down on them, so heavy it’s like they’re wrapped in gauze. Like the rest of the world’s fuzzed out around them. There could be eighteen tornadoes bearing down on them right now and they wouldn’t be able to see them.

Chuck stares down at the radar and decides that he doesn’t care. They’re probably not out there and there’s nothing he can do about them if they are.

He closes the laptop and puts it in the backseat, carefully, and unbuckles his seatbelt. His heart is beating fast, adrenaline running in his bloodstream. His hands are shaking.

He reaches up and shuts off Sam’s camera. Puts it in the back seat, next to the laptop.

And then he’s climbing out of his seat and onto Sam’s seat, onto Sam, and Sam’s starting to say something but Chuck’s not waiting for that. He leans down and he kisses Sam, sloppy because he’s too strung out on not dying to care. There’s a heart-stopping moment when Chuck thinks it’s just him in this, that every time he thought Sam was holding eye contact a little too long was just wishful thinking, and this is going to be _the most awkward car wait ever_.

But then Sam’s hand comes up onto his back and Sam’s kissing him back.

Chuck’s losing his balance and he can feel the steering wheel digging into his back but he’s been waiting for this for too damn long to pay attention to that when Sam’s got his hand in Chuck’s hair, his lips on Chuck’s lips.

Chuck pulls back and brushes Sam’s hair away from his face and then kisses him again, slower now. Concentrating. Slowing down.

Sam lifts one of his hands up and touches Chuck’s face. “You’re shaking.”

Chuck laughs. “Yeah.”

“Is it the tornado, or —”

“Definitely _or_ ,” Chuck says, and he’s leaning back down to Sam’s mouth.

A little while later, Sam rolls down the window. The air outside’s still fuzzed with rain. The temperature’s dropping.

Turns out there are a lot of things to do in a stranded SUV while waiting for the power company to come and rescue you.

* * *

It’s after dark when the power company gets there and removes the lines and Sam and Chuck can get out of the SUV. Sam brought little LED head lamps and they end up using them to search for the probes in the fields.

The head lamps work but every time Chuck tries to look up at Sam’s face, he ends up blinding him with the light.

They find five of the six probes and give up on the sixth for the evening, because the tracker’s not responding and the odds of finding it in the dark are really fucking low.

Still. Chuck now has linked data from five probes from the same storm. This is the storm chaser’s holy grail. There are chasers who would kill for this kind of data.

The irony of nearly getting killed collecting it is not lost on Chuck.

They stop at the first hotel they find. The plan was originally for Sam to take the night bus out, but that plan changed when they got trapped by the tornado. So it’s a hotel for the night, the last night of the season, and then first thing tomorrow Sam jumps on a bus. He can make it back just in time for Dean’s party.

Chuck goes in to check in and they get the last room. King-size. One bed.

He goes out to tell Sam and Sam’s eyes are dark under the reddish-orange of the lights in the parking lot.

“If it was a double room, you’d still be getting me in your bed,” Sam says.

Chuck looks up at him. Yeah.

* * *

Sam wakes up late and tangled around Chuck.

All he wants to do is spend the morning in bed, with Chuck. But Dean’s party is tonight and there’s no time left. The clock says he’s already running late for his bus.

Sam turns his back on the clock and puts his nose into Chuck’s hair. Holds Chuck until he wakes up and there’s no excuses left for them not to get out of there.

* * *

Chuck wakes up slowly, not wanting to leave what feels like a dream but isn’t. But then he remembers — _shit, Dean’s party_ — and he knows it’s important to Sam. It should be important to Sam. He has an entire life back in Colorado and he doesn’t need complications like scruffy, emotionally-underdeveloped professors with a life-long phobia of tornadoes getting in the way of that.

They’re running way behind when they leave the hotel.

Chuck looks down at the clock in the car. They are cutting this really close.

“I could drive you to Colorado,” he says, on impulse, because why the hell not? He’s just going to be doing the long slog back to Maryland all by himself.

“You wanted to go try to find the last probe,” Sam says. “I’m fine. The bus is fine.”

Chuck’s not sure how to take that. He did want to find the last probe but if the tracker’s not responding, he’s not sure how useful daylight is going to be.

Maybe Sam just doesn’t want him in Colorado.

Chuck wants to kiss Sam goodbye, but they’re at a bus station and this is Kansas and Sam’s going to be on a bus with these losers for the next few hours.

The bus is only just pulling out of the station and Chuck’s already kicking himself for not insisting on driving Sam home.

Chuck doesn’t find the last probe.

* * *

Sam doesn’t get back to Colorado in time to put his grand bachelor party plan into action. (His original plan: a Hangover-themed scavenger hunt for the Impala the morning after the party itself. He figures Dean might have killed him, though, so maybe it’s for the best.)

Dean’s fine with an unplanned party as long as strippers and alcohol are involved. Sam feels the need to go along with it, make sure he’s not the worst Best Man in the history of the wedding-industrial complex. So he wakes up the next morning with a killer hangover, wedding shit to get caught up on, and no text messages from Chuck. Or emails from Chuck. Or calls from Chuck.

Sam spends the day running errands from a list as long as his arm and checking his phone at five-minute intervals. He’s starting to wonder if Chuck blames him for what happened, that last storm. The almost-getting killed part of it. Chuck’s the meteorologist, but Sam’s the one who’s got the experience in the field. Sam’s the one who should have cleared the roadway. Checked the damn bridge. Chuck always wanted to leave himself two escape routes and Sam’s the one who didn’t check that.

Sam knows this is irrational, in his brain, but his heart just keeps looking at his cell phone and seeing the truth, which is that Chuck isn’t calling.

Maybe this is over. Maybe it was just one of those storm season things.

Sam throws himself back into the wedding errands. The more stupid bullshit he fills his days with, the less time he has to think.

* * *

Chuck throws himself into the data.

It’s good data and normally, it’d keep him fully occupied. He’d fall into one of his analysis comas, one of those times when teaching and grant-writing and all the other administrivata that a professor has to cope with are giving him a break, and he can get a really deep dive into the theory and the math and the underpinnings of the whole thing. Get some code hacked out and let Matlab chew on it.

But right now, he’s too distracted. He has the data and Matlab is behaving itself perfectly, something that never happens when Chuck has something interesting to work on, and yet he’s not concentrating.

He waits for Sam to email or call or whatever. Chuck’s pretty sure he doesn’t have much to offer here and he doesn’t want to back Sam into anything on the basis of one stupid (amazing) night at the end of storm season.

Chuck works with grad students. He’s seen storm season hookups before. He’s seen them end badly. You’re on the road with someone, in dangerous situations. Of course things happen.

Sam has a family back in Colorado. His brother. The town he grew up in. A life. Probably one that has a lot more to offer him than a not-yet-tenured professor living in a one-bath, two-bed condo in suburban Maryland.

Maybe it was stupid of Chuck to think that whatever that was with Sam could be something more.

Chuck tries to throw himself into his data. But mostly he ends up fretting.

* * *

After the wedding, Dean and his beloved head off for a well-deserved honeymoon in the Impala, and Sam’s left alone in a house that’s been trashed by wedding preparations with nobody to keep him company and no errands to distract him.

By the time he’s done cleaning up the house from all the wedding shit, Sam’s made a decision: if Chuck still hasn’t reached out, then Sam has to assume he’s not interested. For his own sanity, if nothing else.

So he finds other projects. He’s been playing around with an idea for a new YouTube channel for a while now — nothing serious, but something a little more respectable than what he was doing with Dean. No Impala. No stupid tricks. Just interesting weather footage he’s collected over the years with some basics on the science, explained as well as Sam knows how.

He uploads the first video, a long thing on thunderstorms with some time-lapse he shot with Chuck that’s frankly amazing, and gets a few hits. Not as many as he hoped for. So he edits together some old footage with some of his new footage for a couple more tornado videos for the Storm Facers channel and adds in a pointer to his new channel. That brings in more hits. On both channels.

He’s editing another Storm Facers video when he realizes that he’s hoping that Chuck’s going to reach out to talk to him about it. It’s footage they got together.

He still hasn’t done anything with the footage from that last tornado.

* * *

Chuck watches Sam’s new videos and leaves anon comments saying “This is awesome! Weather is so cool!” and feels stupid because he can’t think of anything he could say under his real name.

He also starts obsessively re-watching older Storm Facers videos, which makes him feel like a stalker or a sad-sack but there’s just something about watching Sam push his hair back from his face and put the camera up on his shoulder. He’s seen Sam do that. He’s brushed his hands through Sam’s hair and it’s exactly as magical as he always imagined it’d be.

Chuck knows he’s screwed when he gets the alert from Matlab that his latest data run is crunched and ready for his review, and he hits next episode on Storm Facers instead of looking at it.

* * *

It’s a typical late-summer day in Maryland, which means that the humidity is trying its damnedest to get up past 100% and the heat is oppressive.

There’s a thunderstorm watch and Chuck’s been watching the radar all day from his office, in between runs on his new shiny data set. The summer students are gone and most of the rest of the campus is cleared out, for vacations or long weekends or whatever. Chuck’s still here mostly because he doesn’t have anything planned for the long weekend, and he doesn’t want to think about how empty his condo is. If he goes home he’s just going to stew in his own juices, feeling sorry for himself, and he’s got enough of that already planned for the weekend.

He’s about to give in and re-watch his favorite episode of Storm Chasers — nobody’s around to judge him — when someone knocks on his open office door.

Chuck spins around in his chair, expecting it to be Lynette, the departmental assistant who works down the hall, asking if she can head out for the weekend because Chuck’s the last one sad enough to be left here and she doesn’t want to leave him all alone.

But when he looks up, it’s not Lynette.

It’s Sam.

Chuck can’t find anything to say.

“Hey,” Sam says.

He looks — nervous, maybe? Chuck’s too busy feeling his own emotions to try to read Sam’s.

“ _Hey_ ,” Chuck says. It takes a minute and then he remembers that he can stand up. He’s still looking up at Sam but now he’s on his feet.

“I saw the new videos,” Chuck says.

Sam’s talking at the same time. “So I saw that Maryland was in for some rough —”

They both break off and then Chuck gestures for Sam to keep talking.

“What did you think of the new videos?” Sam asks, and it sounds like he really cares about Chuck’s opinion.

“I thought they were great.” Chuck’s still keeping on his side of the office, next to his desk. “You did a really good job of breaking it down. And you had some terrific footage.”

“You were there for a lot of it,” Sam says.

“Yeah.”

Chuck meets his eyes and Sam _looks_ at him for a moment and then comes inside, shuts the office door behind him.

“I had this whole speech worked out,” Sam says. “I was going to play it cool and ask you if you wanted to come film with me.”

“Film?” Chuck asks, because he’s still stuck on the fact that Sam is here. In person. In Chuck’s office.

“Yeah,” Sam says, “I’m working on this whole weather series and there’s some —” He stops.

Sam crowds into Chuck’s personal space and Chuck’s just looking up at him.

“I like you,” Sam says, raising his hand to Chuck’s face and brushing his thumb over his cheek. “I really like you. And I’m okay with it if you don’t really like me and I know I’m kind of a mess and you’ve got your life figured out. But I like you. I figured one of us had to say it and it might as well be me.”

Chuck can’t handle this, that there’s any part of Sam that could think he’s not good enough for Chuck, because that’s clearly ridiculous. He can’t think of anything to say so he reaches up, pulls Sam down to his level so Chuck can kiss him. Chuck’s been replaying the kisses in the car in the rain in his memory but this is even better, because Sam’s not going away this time. Chuck is not going to let him go away this time. If he has anything to say about it.

“I want to come film with you,” Chuck says, when they come up for air.

Sam bends his head down so his face is right up in Chuck’s face. “I thought you blamed me for that last storm.”

“You’re not responsible for the weather.” Chuck reaches his hand up to Sam’s hair. It’s longer, a little. He pushes it back and leans up for Sam to kiss him again.

Sam pulls back after a bit. “So?”

“So I like you a lot, too,” Chuck says.

Sam’s eyes go all sappy, so Chuck pulls him back down for another kiss.

* * *

It’s the first big storm of the season, and Chuck and Sam are in the breakfast bar of a no-name motel in Oklahoma.

It’s still early in the season, so they’re part of the only research team so far: Chuck, Sam, and two of Chuck’s grad students — Theresa, who’s new this year, and Casey, whose excitement about getting out on the road with Chuck again is only matched by his delight at knowing that he gets to run the DOW for at least some of the time.

They’ll be trading off Doppler duty so Chuck can hang with Sam. Filming. Dropping probes. Facing the tornadoes in person.

Sam’s new web series is taking off. The numbers aren’t as good as Storm Facers, but they’re decent and he even got a special shout-out in an NPR program on online educational content. He and Chuck sometimes take off for the weekend, head somewhere that’s about to have interesting weather. It’s a change for Sam, chasing something other than tornadoes, but Chuck’s always happy to sit in the passenger seat and refresh the radar for him.

He still spends time in Colorado, with Dean. But every time Sam drives his Prius back across the country, there’s more stuff in it to move into Chuck’s place.

Casey and Theresa are fighting over the NWS data on the laptop. Sam’s got the stuff loaded into the car, so as soon as they finish breakfast, the team is tracking back to western Kansas to try to hit another storm cell.

Sam looks down at Chuck. “Nice having the Doppler back, after last year.”

Chuck grins up at him. “Yeah. Well, last year had its advantages.”

Sam pulls him in to kiss his forehead.

“Time to hit the road,” Chuck says, because if they don’t get going they’re going to miss the best of today’s storms.

Sam kisses him again, because that’s just what Sam does, the enormous sap. And Chuck loves him for it.

Chuck grins. “Let’s get back out there and face some storms.”


End file.
